Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Viswa Mandalapu Computer World News

Google I/O has not officially started, but the developers'
show is already seeing some action. Two warring factions, the Resistance and
the Enlightenment, are vying for control of various "portals" at key
landmarks throughout San Francisco, which are leaking dangerous amounts of
radioactive energy, to determine the fate of the city and ultimately the world.

If that scenario sounds a bit incredible, it's because it's
playing out not in reality but on dozens of attendees' Android-powered
smartphones, within a game called Ingress.

The mobile game, which Google is referring to as an MMOG, or
a massively multiplayer online game, is currently in closed beta and only
available by invitation from the company's Play Store. But it has already
attracted some pretty serious players at I/O, as part of a competition at the
show.

Ingress is a geolocation, augmented reality-type game. It
plots the player's real-life location on a grid similar to Google Maps, which
uses actual data served up through the Android phone's location services that
doubles as elements within the game.

In other words, the player could be walking past a fire
station at an intersection in real life, but in Ingress that fire station might
be a portal that must be defended by the player lest it get captured by the
enemy and used for evil.

"I've been able to meet new people through the game,
and it helps me get out and about," said Todd Neumann, an I/O attendee
from Huntsville, Alabama.

At the moment there are more than 100,000 portals globally
within Ingress, a Google representative said at I/O, which are meant to be
discovered by players as they explore and interact with their actual physical
surroundings in real life. Gamers can gain points, "level up" and
unlock new objectives in Ingress based on how may portals they uncover and how
they engage with those portals, such as by "hacking" them for
supplies or by attacking the portal if it's controlled by an enemy faction.

But Lukas Jarosch, cofounder of the Munich-based Android
gaming engine Andlabs, sees Ingress as mostly just another way for Google to
gain more data about its users.

"It was too much walking around, and I didn't want to
be taken on all these detours," he said, adding that he'd like to see more
gameplay features in future iterations.

For the kick-off competition at I/O, dubbed "Operation
Fan-Out," Google has designated more than a dozen landmarks around San
Francisco as key portals within Ingress, such as the Palace of Fine Arts, Coit
Tower, the Chinatown gate and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.